A Second Gold Toilet!?

0:06Emily Peck: Hello and welcome to Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Bloomberg. I'm here with Emily Peck of Axios.

0:18Felix Salmon: Hello.

0:19Emily Peck: I'm here with Elizabeth Spiers of the New York Times. Hello. And we are on YouTube. so we are like you can see us saying hello I mean can you imagine anything more fun than literally watching your favorite Slate Money Go hosts say hello you can do that now I am in a dimly lit room in Ballyconimi in Ireland Emily Peck is in Westchester and is preparing for the marathon Elizabeth Peck is in sorry

0:52Felix Salmon: no

0:53Emily Peck: Elizabeth Spires is in Brooklyn and is going to be cheering on the marathon. But before we get to that point, we are going to have conversations. We are going to have discussions. We are going to talk about OpenAI, which is now a fully-fledged for-profit company, albeit a PBC. We will discuss what a PBC is. We are going to talk about health insurance and how very expensive it is, which is not good. And it's also caused this whole government shutdown. Many bad things. We are going to talk about a solid gold toilet that is coming up for auction at Sotheby's. We have a Slate Plus segment for the ages, wherein Emily Peck rants about job openings and job losses and whether any of them can be attributed meaningfully to AI.

1:47It's a good one this week, and it's all coming up on Slate Money.

1:57Emily Peck: So let's start this week with OpenAI, because this is a saga that has been going on for a long time. We have covered it on this show in the past. And now it seems to have finally culminated in the thing that everyone wondered whether they could do it. Turns out they can do it. a non-profit charity, 501c3, can, with enough lawyers and effort, actually become a for-profit company. I don't think I've really seen this before, nothing quite like this before. But OpenAI is now a for-profit company. It has roughly 25 % of it is owned by a non-profit. The rest of it has a standard shareholding type situation.

2:42Emily Peck: And we are told that they are probably going to go public. They're going to have an IPO either next year or the year after, because that's the only way they can raise enough money to, you know, take over the world. Emily, is this a good thing or a bad thing or neither?

3:00Felix Salmon: I mean, it's hard to say. Okay, this is what I wrote down.

3:06Emily Peck: Don't tell us, Emily, just write it down, because that's the best thing to do on a podcast.

3:11Elizabeth Spiers: Yes. And now that we're on video, you can just hold it up to the camera.

3:14Felix Salmon: Well, I didn't print it out. Do you want to wait while I do that? No, this is what I think. So OpenAI is now a public benefit corporation, a PBC, which begs the question right away, where's the public benefit with this company?

3:28Emily Peck: I'm going to be that person who says like, that's not what begs the question means, but go on.

3:32Felix Salmon: I'm so sorry. Can we cut that? It raises the question. Does this company do anything that benefits the public or anything for social welfare or social good? I don't think so.

3:45Emily Peck: Well, so let's answer that question, because the official OpenAI answer to that question is, there is now a nonprofit that has a stake in OpenAI worth$130 billion. They can now start spending that money, and they've already announced$50 million here and however many other million there. They say they're going to start supporting various attempts to cure cancer and do other great and wonderful things. And just in terms of the size of the balance sheet, there are very, very few charities on the planet that have as much money as the nonprofit.

4:25Felix Salmon: Not to push back at you, but you did not just answer the question. They say they're going to do cancer research is not an answer to the question of does this company do anything that benefits the public. We had Kashmir Hill on the show a few weeks ago to talk about how ChatGPT, the product that they make that millions and millions of people use, drives people to psychosis and in some instances even murder and other bad stuff. There was some new data that OpenAI put out this past week with numbers showing like a small sliver for a small sliver of users become psychotic using the product. And the percentages were small, but it was in the tens of thousands of people.

5:06Felix Salmon: So there's an argument that instead of being good for the public, this harms the public.

5:11Emily Peck: Absolutely. To be clear, I 100 % agree with you on this one. The whole point of a public benefit corporation is that the corporation, Quay Corporation, should act in the public benefit. Just because some percentage of its equity is owned by a charity does not make the corporation a good corporation, which is working in the public interest. The way that OpenAI says that they are dealing with this question is by taking all of the members of the non-profit board and basically making them the for-profit board members too. And the idea is that these board members are going to somehow have the world's interests at heart rather than just shareholders' interests at heart when they make their decisions.

5:59Emily Peck: All I will say about that is one of those board members is Larry Summers.

6:05Elizabeth Spiers: I'll say the one board member who has a non-voting share is this trust and safety guy who is ostensibly dealing with what Emily was talking about. But I just want to highlight that you know it's not the the bar for becoming a public benefit corporation is pretty low you can justify and these are called b corps informally no that's two different things you're right the bar for becoming a if you're not watching on youtube guys something fantastic

6:36Emily Peck: just happened and we don't quite know how can i can i do this does that work again

6:40Felix Salmon: for those listening.

6:42Elizabeth Spiers: Balloons just emerged in front of Luke's face because he gestured.

6:46Emily Peck: I don't know how to get the balloons back, but I hope to God that the balloons will come back. But in the absence, all I will say is that you are right that the bar for becoming a PBC is low. Basically, all you need to do is say, I'm a PBC, and then you're a PBC. By the same token, if you ever want to stop being a PBC, all you need to say is, we are no longer a PBC, and then you're no longer a PVC. It doesn't really constrain you in any important or strategic way. A B Corp is different. A B Corp is a company that has been certified by B Lab as reaching a certain level of standards. And that certification is quite difficult to achieve.

7:24Emily Peck: And so long as you keep that level of, so long as you keep that certification, there is at least some kind of third party, you know, respected third party saying, yes, you are doing your bit to make the world a better place.

7:37Elizabeth Spiers: You're right. But I have encountered so many PBCs that refer to themselves as B Corp, despite not clearing that certification. They're sort of used interchangeably, even if they shouldn't be.

7:48Emily Peck: Yeah, do not call yourself a B Corp if you're not a B Corp, people. That's just lying.

7:52Felix Salmon: I guess also, now that I'm like sort of thinking about it, and one could argue I should have thought about it before coming onto the Zoom, But just because a company is a nonprofit also doesn't mean it's a good company. Like there are tons of not-for-profits like more in the political space that, you know, you could really have strong arguments either way. They're good for society, bad for society, benefits society, blah, blah, blah.

8:16Emily Peck: Yeah, I mean, there are lots of companies that are governed by or owned by nonprofits. Like Bertelsmann, the publishing house, for instance, is owned by a nonprofit. Does that make it a good company? I don't know. I believe up until very recently, the NFL was technically a non-profit. And that doesn't make it a good company. It's just a form of corporate ownership, that's all.

8:39Elizabeth Spiers: Yeah, it's really just about the tax status. Because with a non-profit, the big difference is that it's also a misnomer. Most non-profits are profitable, or they should be. But it's about what happens to the assets if you dissolve the company. And in a nonprofit, the company doesn't get dispersed to shareholders or owners or anything like that. You're required to disperse the assets toward whatever cause that you're supposedly supporting. And that usually means turning over assets to a similar nonprofit. So it's really just a tax status and ownership status thing.

9:15Felix Salmon: What OpenAI has done is just restructured itself so that it can take more money from investors and maybe go public. Yes. but it's the same company. Maybe with operating with a slight more freedom to do things like work on chat GPT versus work on curing cancer and things like that.

9:34Emily Peck: Yeah, basically what happened a while back was that Sam Altman became CEO of OpenAI and said, look, we are a nonprofit and our job is to create a safe AGI, artificial general intelligence. And it turns out upon doing a bunch of back of the envelope math, that the cost of creating a safe AGI is orders of magnitude greater than we will ever be able to raise in charitable donations. Therefore, we need to raise the money some other way. Now, this is not an obvious conclusion, right? What he could have said is, whoops, therefore, we're not going to be able to create a safe AGI, and therefore, we should use OpenAI to do something else.

10:17Emily Peck: But instead, he said, we really, really want to create a safe AGI, or at least an AGI. And so what we're going to do is raise the money some other way. And so he created a whole bunch of weird structures that allowed entities like Microsoft to invest money in or to give money to OpenAI in return for pieces of paper that may or may not end up being worth money in the future. It turns out that those pieces of paper did end up worth being money in the future. Microsoft, to give the most obvious example, invested about$13 billion in OpenAI, and its stake in OpenAI is now worth 10 times that. So, you know, people did make money by investing in OpenAI.

10:57Emily Peck: OpenAI did use that investment to create ChatGPT and all of its other products. And OpenAI is convinced that creating ChatGPT is good for the planet for reasons. But I think Emily's point is well taken, that it's not easy to find a bunch of people outside OpenAI who would agree that ChatGPT is good for the planet.

11:21Felix Salmon: Yeah, I mean, in fact, it's requiring all this additional electricity use, stressing the power grids in various places, raising electricity prices. Planet destroying, in a way. For the environment, I guess, as Elizabeth just said.

11:36Emily Peck: And chat GPT of all of the different chat LLM based chat bots out there is designed to be addictive in the way that many of the other ones are not. If you do a Google search and you get like a Gemini answer to your Google search on the top of your search results, it doesn't end with a sort of eager to please. Can I maybe do this for you or that for you and try and keep you engaged? Just gives you what you are looking for, ideally, and then shuts up. which is less addictive and probably better for the psyches of the users. We don't have a bunch of Kashmir Hill stories about people falling in love with Google Gemini.

12:19Felix Salmon: Right. Oh, here's the number that came out this week. 0.07 % of chat GPT users active in a given week exhibit signs of mental health emergencies related to psychosis or mania. And that sounds like a small number, but it's 560 ,000 people.

12:34Emily Peck: Half a million people?

12:36Felix Salmon: Yeah, that's for the math, Casey Newton's math.

12:39Emily Peck: Well, you know, Casey's a friend of the pod. We'll trust his math on this one.

12:43Felix Salmon: Yeah, that's how he mathed it. That's a lot of people. We don't need to relitigate.

12:48Elizabeth Spiers: Well, also, ChatGPT is their public consumer-facing product, but they're also working on a lot of other stuff. I learned in the prep, which I didn't realize this, they had acquired Johnny Ives' firm because they want to develop a hardware product, which is mind-boggling. It didn't really go into what kind of product, but...

13:07Emily Peck: Yeah, no one knows. They're being very secretive about this. They did spend a huge amount of money on a video where Sam Altman and Johnny Ive waltzed around San Francisco and say loving things to each other. There has been reporting saying that this attempt to build a hardware product is going more slowly than they had hoped. It is kind of wild that Johnny Ive, who became dynastically wealthy working at Apple, made so much more money by selling his loss-making startup to Sam Altman. I mean, the price tag was reportedly$6 billion. It's completely insane. And then the amounts of cash being thrown around right now in the AI space are wild.

13:47Emily Peck: But no, I think for the time being, it is fair to say that 99 % of the value of open AI is chat GPT and the research that is going on around like extending that and hopefully building this AGI which I'm not sure that many people want but you know Sam Altman does I do love by the way that Sam Altman still doesn't have any equity in this thing and he's got like no equity and he's getting paid$72 ,000 a year to to be the CEO yeah

14:20Felix Salmon: Explain that to me. How does he have a lot of money? What's going on with him?

14:24Emily Peck: Because he's founded a bunch of other companies and has done very well for himself as an investor. He was the president of Y Combinator for a long time. He was a VC. I think he's the single largest individual investor in Reddit. He has a lot of Reddit shares. Yeah. I bet his AGI, his adjusted gross income,

14:44Felix Salmon: which is what I always think of when anyone says that. I bet it's pretty low and he doesn't pay a lot of taxes. I think that's probably correct. $75 ,000 a year and all his wealth is in stocks. Slang.

14:54Emily Peck: He does have a predilection for very fast cars, which I'm sure he just buys by borrowing money from a bank rather than actually having to declare income.

15:04Felix Salmon: Wow. Wait, so I would just add, I guess, they should be a for-profit company because they make a really successful product that if successful, and I'm not like an AI hype person, and I think we might talk about that later. But I mean, ChatGPT is an incredibly successful tech product that could and does, that does already rival Google search is stealing business away from Google search, which is a gigantic money printing behemoth. And if they succeed, like if they keep going down that road, they will be a massive company, even if they don't do the AGI part, you know?

15:41Emily Peck: Yeah, but that would involve that. This is an interesting question, right? Because in order to make as much money as Google does, they would need to enshitify themselves to the degree that Google has done, right? The Google search, you know, is not in and of itself, something that people pay money for. Like as someone who uses search, I don't like happily fork over cash to Google every time I want it to do a search for me. What happens is that Google basically sells me to advertisers and makes the product worse by creating the first search result to be an ad that gives me something that I don't want rather than the thing that I do want and making the product worse for me.

16:27Emily Peck: And so the question really becomes, if Google is run by a bunch of noble-minded individuals who sit on the board of a non-profit that controls the company, rather than by a bunch of people who feel like they have a fiduciary obligation to common shareholders, then might it be less likely to inshittify its product by plastering it in ads?

16:54Elizabeth Spiers: And I don't know the answer. I don't think that there's anything to stop OpenAI from inshittification because the non-profit board seems to be controlled by the for-profit interest and not the other way around.

17:06Emily Peck: Well, I mean, so technically speaking, in terms of the structure of the company, it is the other way around. that the nonprofit controls the for-profit.

17:15Elizabeth Spiers: Well, I realize that, but in practice.

17:17Felix Salmon: In practice. I mean, and we saw what happened when the board of OpenAI tried to take action because they were worried about the future of the company, right? Right. They fired the CEO, everyone got rehired, and then the board was out.

17:29Emily Peck: The CEO fired the board.

17:31Felix Salmon: Money trumps anything else in this case. That's the through line of everything.

17:36Emily Peck: Right, and now you look at the board, and it's people like Brett Taylor, who was on the board of Twitter and happily sold out to Elon Musk. There's people like Larry Summers, who's never met a dollar he didn't like. And yeah, I am not going to place any faith whatsoever in Brett Taylor and Larry Summers to draw the line at getting revenues from selling ads against chat GPT results. But to be clear, they haven't done it yet.

18:07Felix Salmon: In the history of oversight boards that are put in place, I know this is more than just an oversight board, but in the history of oversight boards that are put in place to make sure no shenanigans go on in various private companies. I'm thinking of Meta slash Facebook had an oversight board for a while that did something with something privacy.

18:25Emily Peck: Yeah, but it was called an oversight board, but it didn't oversee the company. It just kind of, it was like this place you could appeal to if you didn't like, you know, the policies of Facebook.

18:33Felix Salmon: And when News Corp bought the Wall Street Journal, they put – not the same thing as a corporate board, I understand. I do understand. But again, they put in place like some kind of oversight board. They're like, don't worry. We have the oversight board. They're going to be watching us. Like, boards? I don't know, man.

18:52Elizabeth Spiers: It's just liability and cover your ass. It's the – so that if something goes wrong, they're not accused of not being on top of it. It's optics.

19:01Emily Peck: No, I mean, that's definitely one possibility, right? The other possibility is that it's real. And Emily is like asking. To be sure. Emily is asking whether there are examples of.

19:13Felix Salmon: I am asking that.

19:14Emily Peck: Boards which control a company that actually do make it.

19:18Felix Salmon: Oversight. Yeah, provide oversight and keep it on the straight and narrow and stop it from shitifying.

19:25Emily Peck: Rolex, weirdly. Okay. Might be one example. Rolex is a nonprofit company. and it seems to have done a pretty good job of, you know, maximizing sales and profits without incentivizing its product and making sure that it continues to stay true to its mission of supporting various pits of art and culture. No, selling the watches is the for-profit bit, right?

19:52Felix Salmon: Okay.

19:52Emily Peck: And then, you know, and then the nonprofit gets a whole bunch of money from selling the watches and then it goes off and, you know, uses that money in the furtherance of public good.

20:00Elizabeth Spiers: How much damage can you do as a watchmaker, though?

20:03Felix Salmon: You could mess with the fabric of time.

20:08Emily Peck: This is a fair point. But, okay, so let me bring up the example of Glaxo Welcome, which is a big, profitable pharmaceutical company, again, that is largely controlled by a nonprofit. I do think there is a relatively strong case to be made that Glaxo Welcome is less evil than some of the purely for-profit pharma companies. And for that reason. So with Rolex, and I don't know about Glaxo, you said that the nonprofit piece does things for the social good.

20:43Felix Salmon: Will the open eye nonprofit do anything different from the for-profit arm? Like, will it do something else?

20:51Emily Peck: So the for-profit arm is going to be out there, you know, giving chat GPT to the world and for better or for worse, you know, changing the world that way. The non-profit arm has two jobs. One of the jobs is to oversee the for-profit arm. The other job is to use its billions in furtherance of making the world a better place, curing cancer, whatever.

21:16Felix Salmon: Now I feel bad. Now I feel bad that I really trashed it. I didn't realize that part. So I kind of take it back a little.

21:22Emily Peck: We don't know exactly how it's going to use those billions. But it stands to reason that when OpenAI goes public in 2026 or 2027, that some proportion of those shares that are being sold to the company will be sold by the nonprofit part of OpenAI. And it will use however many billions of dollars it gets from selling those shares in the IPO to spend money on good things. because that's what nonprofits are supposed to do. Now, you know, we don't really have, because up until now, the nonprofit, well, open AI hasn't been making any money. So the nonprofit hasn't really had a huge amount of income or liquidity that it could use to spend.

22:08Emily Peck: And so its expenditures have been in like the tens of millions rather than the billions. But eventually, and quite soon, I can easily see the expenditures going up into the billions. And then we'll really see what we think of it as a nonprofit.

22:22Felix Salmon: And Sam Altman will one day make money from OpenAI?

22:26Emily Peck: Look, I mean, it is naive to believe that he hasn't already made money from OpenAI, just not directly by owning shares in it. He has been going around the world trying to sell, you know, Gulf countries on funding a$7 trillion energy thing that he also has stakes in and, you know, this kind of thing.

22:46Elizabeth Spiers: He's off scanning people's eyeballs.

22:49Emily Peck: Oh, yeah. He also was scanning eyeballs. And I'm sure he's made money by scanning eyeballs because everything crypto makes money somehow. So, yeah, there's a bunch of different things that he can do. And because he's Sam Altman, he gets a lot more. Being Sam Altman, being the CEO of OpenAI opens a whole bunch of doors. And when those doors open, he's very good at making money from open doors.

23:12Felix Salmon: Great. So he's going to be OK.

23:13Emily Peck: Let's not worry about Sam.

23:26let's worry instead about the put-upon class of every single american who has a body

23:34Emily Peck: except sam altman possibly even including sam altman because you know where where is he going to get his health insurance um health costs are going up and the news this week is that if you have been buying health insurance off one of barack obama's federal exchange type things then your premiums are going to go up by a lot by i think 24 on average it's more than that if you buy it from a federal exchange it's a little bit less than that if you buy it from a state exchange change but then everyone's premiums are going up there's a bunch of inflation in the health care sector and elizabeth you are here to tell me that this is terribly bad this is terribly bad for everyone i mean i'm inclined to agree but um emily are we in agreement on this one that when health insurance costs go up that's just like a bad thing it's so bad it's really bad it's it's

24:32Felix Salmon: worse when Elizabeth suggested we talk about it. I was like, oh, I better learn about this. So I did my little crash course. I talked to one of Axios's great healthcare reporters, Maya Goldman, and she kind of laid it out for me. And it's so bad. So in 2021, when Biden was president, they did these subsidies for the Affordable Care Act for people who buy health insurance on these exchanges. Health insurance on the exchanges was subsidized for a lot of people, making up to 400 % of the poverty line. Which we should say is 64K a year. Yeah, 64K for households. It's not a lot of money. But if you made more than that, you didn't really get that much help.

25:10Felix Salmon: But they did these big subsidies, the argument being like, it's a pandemic. People should have health insurance. We should make it really cheap and easy for people to have health insurance. I mean, that's been the argument the whole time, that people should have health insurance because we live in a society. But it had resonance in 2021. and everyone knows these subsidies were going to expire. But then, you know, we got a different president and a different Congress and they don't like the subsidies. And now that's like, oh, there's a whole fight going on over that. So at the same time, health insurance costs are like skyrocketing.

25:43Felix Salmon: They've been going up a lot faster than overall inflation for the past few years for various reasons, including the expected expiration of the subsidies, because health insurers are like, when these things expire, a lot of people are going to drop health insurance, probably healthy people that help make insurance profitable. So we need to raise costs to deal with that. So it's like health insurance prices are going up, subsidies are going down, and that's playing off of each other. And it's creating this like perfect storm of everyone spends more money on healthcare.

26:12Emily Peck: Yeah, no, the dynamic whereby the insurers are raising the costs, not because the health care costs are going up, although they are doing that.

26:22Felix Salmon: Yes, that's part of it, too.

26:23Emily Peck: But also because if the price goes up, then healthy people are less likely to take out insurance at all. And that raises the risk profile of the whole group. And so then the average cost of the group has to go up. It's just this horrible, vicious spiral. But I am fascinated by this idea that health insurance is a little bit like, or these subsidies, rather are a little bit like the trump tax cuts that they were like put into law with an expiry date by people who wanted them to be permanent and then you know there's a big fight when they expire between the people who want them to be permanent and the people who are like but they were expiring when they went into law we should just let them expire and their sides are completely the opposite side and this is correct me if i'm wrong basically the one and only necessary and sufficient single issue that is overarching the entire government shut down the sugars and that if we can work out what to do with these health care subsidies then the shutdown ends and if we

27:32Elizabeth Spiers: can't then it doesn't is that right it's crazy is this is a thing that i don't understand about the politics of it, there are issues and specific things that Republicans have constituencies that they really care about. Social Security, Medicare are two of the biggest ones. But healthcare generally, when you have an aging population, I don't understand other than just pushing back against Democrats and not wanting to spend more money why Republicans are so heavily set against keeping the subsidies because their constituents want it.

28:09Felix Salmon: My understanding is the good faith argument. I mean, the White House has made what I would characterize as a bad faith argument that these subsidies go to pay for health insurance for undocumented people. But the good faith argument, I think why Republicans don't like it is they don't like giving subsidies to anyone, much less people who aren't even poor. Like a lot of the comments I see on social media, they'll like pull an example from a news story of like a couple, that pays$500 a month for health insurance is going to have to pay$1 ,500 a month. And then the couple will be like, doesn't work because they're retired, but they're not qualified for Medicare yet.

28:45Felix Salmon: And the criticism is like, they don't deserve this help.

28:48Emily Peck: The people who live like very near the poverty line and have been paying$0 a month for the past four years, those people are going to go up to like somewhere between$30 and$80 a month, which is meaningful money when you're living on the poverty line. But it's definitely one of those things. But Medicare is another one of these things that is quite deliberately not means tested. All of us are going to be eligible for Medicare no matter how rich we are. And that helps to sell all of the payroll taxes that we pay. that like the idea is that I'm sort of funding my future health care once I'm in my dotage, even if I'm still rich when I'm old.

29:39Emily Peck: It's, you know, that this is my payroll taxes going to me rather than this is my payroll taxes going to other people. And so that makes it easier to sell the payroll taxes as a tax. But yeah, you're right that if you don't means test, then obviously then some of the subsidies are going to go to rich people.

29:56Elizabeth Spiers: This is an example of people just not understanding who their constituents are. Some of the people that are going to be affected by this in the worst way are people who are older, but not yet qualified for Medicare. And so there's sort of horror stories of people's premiums doubling from$800 a month for a single person to$2 ,000 a month. And that's like rent money for a lot of people. And on top of$7 ,000,$8 ,000 deductibles. And that's just, you know, when you look at the math, I saw a stat somewhere that said the average family is paying$35 ,000 a year for health insurance now. And just as a portion of income, when you consider median income in this country, that's crazy.

30:41Elizabeth Spiers: That's just a crazy number.

30:42Felix Salmon: I mean, the argument that these Obamacare subsidies for people, you know, who have good incomes isn't fair. Most people have health insurance through their employer. and there are tax benefits that employers get from providing that health insurance. That is a tax break that everyone pays for that benefits, you know, only some people, better paid people, rich workers or whatever you want to call it. But it's so invisible. I don't think people get upset about it.

31:09Emily Peck: Workers do not need to pay income tax on the money that is spent on their behalf for health insurance by their employers.

31:18Felix Salmon: The employer doesn't pay tax. They get a tax break on that money as well, I believe.

31:21Emily Peck: And that is an expense to the employer. And therefore, yeah, that is obviously not an income for the employer. It's an expense for the employer. So they get to deduct that expense from their income when they're calculating their profit. So yeah.

31:32Felix Salmon: So, I mean, the taxpayers are paying for this stuff no matter what. And if people drop health insurance and then these sick people, uninsured sick people, show up at the emergency room, they have to be treated. That costs taxpayers, too. It's really interesting because with the subsidies in 21, it really seemed like we were closer to achieving kind of the dream of the Affordable Care Act and Obamacare. Like, the uninsured rate went down quite a bit. It seemed like these plans were finally really affordable. Like the knock on them when Obamacare first came out was like they weren't really affordable and there were all kinds of people that couldn't do it.

32:10Felix Salmon: It seems like we were getting closer. A lot of people, like you said, Felix, paying zero a month, others paying much less than before. It was like, wow, this is really going to happen. Like this program has become really successful. And now it kind of seems like everything's in question.

32:24Emily Peck: So the thing that I keep on thinking about when I read these stories is something that I wrote about a little bit in my book about COVID, which was that there was this political cleavage. COVID really did tear the country apart politically along its own unique lines. It wasn't a D versus R thing, particularly. But there was the part of the country who thought of COVID as being a public health crisis that required a public response. And then there was the part of the country that thought of it as being an illness that happens to individuals. And that is an individual thing rather than a societal thing.

33:05Emily Peck: And society shouldn't, you know, fall over itself to care about those individuals. And I'm seeing that here, too. that, as you say, Emily, America, kind of uniquely among rich countries, has for decades had a large population of uninsured adults. And when those adults get sick, they, you know, wind up with massive medical bills, and often they die because they can't afford treatment. And that is considered to be a tragedy by the same people who thought of COVID as being a public health crisis, but is considered to be, I don't know, just like part of the standard sort of Hobbesian bargain that we sign up for when we get born by a lot of the people who, you know, life is nasty, brutal, and short, get used to it.

33:58Emily Peck: There's this feeling that like that is just part of the luck of the draw. Like sometimes you're born rich, sometimes you're poor, sometimes you're born healthy, sometimes you're born sick. And these things just happen to people. And yeah, it's more than that.

34:09Elizabeth Spiers: I think there's something built into the American ethos where success is considered a mark of character, good character, and poverty is considered a mark of bad character.

34:19Emily Peck: And health being the same. Like, if you're healthy, that means you're, like, somehow superior. And if something happens to you medically, then that's…

34:26Felix Salmon: You don't eat any seed oils.

34:28Emily Peck: Yeah. If you eat too many seed oils or, like…

34:31Felix Salmon: You did it to yourself.

34:32Emily Peck: …ingest fluoride in your water, then it's all on you, man.

34:51Emily Peck: but yeah enough of this depressing bleak news let's talk about a hundred thousand people taking a shit in america i knew it would come down to some gross conversation we're talking about toilets we're talking about one particular well two gold toilets actually that's what we're talking about there was one gold toilet that was made by a very famous artist named Maurizio Catalan listeners this late money will recall my rant not that long ago about the banana defending it there's a good artwork and this is also a good artwork he made a good he made a 18 karat gold fully functional gold toilet he installed it in the guggenheim for a year a hundred thousand people lined up for hours to be able to take a shit in this solid gold toilet he called it you

35:42Felix Salmon: have to stop saying that can you just say use the toilet we don't know what they were doing use the toilet the toilet you know obviously it became this kind of meme it resonated in the Guggenheimian consciousness.

35:57Emily Peck: And then...

35:57Felix Salmon: Guggenheimian.

35:59Emily Peck: Well done, Emily. We can rely on you for their jokes.

36:03Felix Salmon: Thank you.

36:04Emily Peck: It then made its way to Blenheim Castle in England for some reason, where it was exhibited from whence it was stolen by a bunch of thieves who realized that since it was solid gold, they didn't need to try and fence this to some kind of art buyer. All they needed to do was chop it up into gold pieces, sell them off, melt them down, and make millions of dollars. So it kind of got destroyed, and everyone thought that was the end of the story. But it was not the end of the story. There is another chapter to this story, because it turns out that back in 2017, Mauricio Catalin's gallery, Marian Goodman, sold a second toilet.

36:47Emily Peck: There was a second toilet all along. And now that toilet is coming up for auction at Sotheby's. And because the gold price has gone up so much, the bullion value of this toilet alone is on the order of$10 million.

37:04Felix Salmon: I like this better than the banana in that it has that intrinsic value, whereas the banana or the banana, as you say, is pretty cheap, right? And this is real. This has real value. unlike other types of art that we've discussed on the show.

37:19Elizabeth Spiers: I love Catalan, and he's made these things that somehow become prescient. And so the fact that the toilets came out right before Donald Trump became president and the thing is called America, there was a great New York Post headline that said when it was at the Guggenheim, the Guggenheim wants you to crap all over America. And it just feels like of the moment.

37:42Felix Salmon: Yes. What does it mean, Felix?

37:44Elizabeth Spiers: What does it mean, Felix?

37:46Felix Salmon: We spoke in the slap of socialism and something, something Marxist, something, something product of labor, something, something into the toilet. But I don't really, I couldn't make it make sense when I was thinking about this last night. So I thought I would ask you.

38:02Emily Peck: It's conceptual art, Emily.

38:04Felix Salmon: So it doesn't make sense.

38:05Emily Peck: So, okay, let me talk a little bit about two iconic pieces of conceptual art. because you have to understand this piece in the context of the broader history of conceptualism.

38:17Felix Salmon: You can't just know toilets. You have to know other stuff about art. You can't just be like, it's a toilet. I know about toilets.

38:23Emily Peck: It suffices to know toilets, but it becomes a richer artwork if you know a little bit more. Right. The more you know.

38:32Felix Salmon: The more you know.

38:33Emily Peck: The more you know. So if you go back to the very beginning of conceptual art, probably, arguably the very first conceptual artwork was a piece by Marcel Duchamp called Fountain. Are you familiar with this work?

38:52Felix Salmon: Yes.

38:52Emily Peck: What is Fountain?

38:54Felix Salmon: Oh, I think it's a fountain. Elizabeth? I don't remember. Is it also a toilet? Didn't Duchamp also do a toilet?

39:02Emily Peck: Exactly. Yes. The fountain is a urinal placed on a pedestal and reconceptualized as an artwork. And so this idea of taking a piece of, you know, plumbing from your bathroom and making it an artwork dates back 100 years, basically, to Marcel Duchamp. then fast forward 40 ish years from there to the 1960s and this guy called piero manzoni who was an italian conceptual artist started canning his i hate to use this word but there's no other word oh no he started canning his own shit and he called it the shit of the artist and he would sell cans of his shit as art right because he was making a commentary on how things that are touched by artists seem to be worth a hell of a lot more just because they're touched by the artist if i put a urinal on a pedestal that would be a dumb fucking stunt and it would be worthless but if du champ's urinal went up for auction because it's du champ's urinal and not my urinal it would be worth tens of millions of dollars right so so manzoni then started selling his own shit in cans and those cans do come up for auction and they sell for substantial amounts of money again in a way that if anyone else canned their own shit they would not be able to sell that they would be locked up so the there is a sort of shall we call it scatological tradition in conceptual art.

40:40Emily Peck: And there are other pieces in that tradition as well. And America belongs in that tradition. It also belongs in a tradition of sort of stunt art where you're using an enormous amount of money's worth of materials to make the piece. And the most famous other piece in that vein was a Damien Hirst piece called For the Love of God that was made out of 8 ,100 diamonds placed in the shape of a platinum skull. And, you know, he went around saying that it was worth$50 million just in sort of diamond value alone, but never found a buyer for it. Never found a buyer for it. So that is still sitting in a warehouse somewhere, kind of unsold.

41:25Felix Salmon: Who's going to buy the gold toilet? And do you think they'll install it in one of their bathrooms?

41:30Emily Peck: Justin's son and yes, is my guess.

41:33Felix Salmon: Justin's son is a crypto guy who bought the banana.

41:35Emily Peck: Yeah. Yeah. And Sotheby's is accepting crypto in payment for the toilet. And this does kind of strike me. I'm sure that Justin Sun was the first person that Sotheby's phoned up when they got the consignment and they're like, hey, can we interest you in the toilet? And I'm 100 % sure that if Justin Sun ends up buying the toilet, then he will turn it into a whole stunt. And he will allow people to use the toilet and he will install the toilet in some kind of semi-public place and try and get headlines out of it.

42:05Felix Salmon: And remind me again, how much the toilet is worth just in pure gold?

42:09Emily Peck: On the order of$10 million, although it's 101.2 kilograms of 18 karat gold, if you want to do the math yourself. You multiply that by three quarters to get the weight of actual gold, and then you multiply that by$4 ,000 a troy ounce. And it comes to like, at$4 ,000 an ounce, it comes to about$9.8 million.

42:27Felix Salmon: And what did the banana sell for?

42:29Emily Peck: 6.2.

42:30Felix Salmon: Okay, so it's already worth more than the banana just right now, just if you melted it down. So it's going to be a lot more than the banana probably. Yeah.

42:39Emily Peck: Oh, and because Sotheby's can't resist a marketing stunt of its own, the opening bid is going to be the bullion value of the piece. And then it will just like go up from there.

42:51Felix Salmon: That makes sense. Of course. Of course. And when is this going on sale? So we can all put in our bids?

42:56Emily Peck: Yeah. If you want to bid, phone up Sotheby's. They're in the phone book. Phone book.

43:01Felix Salmon: Get your phone book out.

43:03Emily Peck: Get your phone book out. Turn to S for Sotheby's and put in your bid. And if you win, you'll find out on November the 18th. That's when the auction is.

43:13Felix Salmon: You could install it before Thanksgiving. So America, like you have your Thanksgiving dinner. And then you're like, if you need to use the restroom, you can use my gold toilet. I really like that.

43:22Emily Peck: Yeah. I mean, you would need to get it from Sotheby's. So like probably you'd need to be in North America somewhere. But yeah, I think that's an almost optimal use case.

43:33Felix Salmon: Goals, yeah.

43:34Emily Peck: I mean, it's called America. And what is more American than Thanksgiving?

43:38Felix Salmon: Right. What's more American than going to the bathroom after a big Thanksgiving meal and using a golden toilet to do it?

43:45Emily Peck: Hard agree. Yes.

43:47Felix Salmon: What if Donald Trump buys it?

43:48Emily Peck: Well, so this is actually, there's an interesting story about that, which is that when Donald Trump was president the first time around, He was decorating the White House, and one of his minions approached the Guggenheim and said, hey, you have this artwork. Can we please borrow it to put on the wall of the White House? We like the art, and Donald Trump likes the art, and he wants to have it in the White House. Which is the kind of request that presidents do make of museums, and often museums do say yes. But in this particular case, Guggenheim replied by saying, no, but we will lend you America if you want that.

44:32Felix Salmon: Now he's taking his revenge out on everyone. So thanks for that, Guggenheim.

44:49Emily Peck: Let's have a numbers round. Emily, what's your number?

44:53Felix Salmon: My number is two. That is the number of people that I'm aware of who are named Bill de Blasio.

44:59Emily Peck: Oh, I love this story so much. And they're both New Yorkers.

45:05Felix Salmon: Yes, they are both New Yorkers. One was the mayor of New York City. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The other is a 59-year-old Long Island wine importer named Bill de Blasio, capital D. And the Times of London, which is a reputable newspaper, emailed Bill de Blasio, capital D, 59-year-old Long Island wine importer, and asked him for his thoughts on the maybe new mayor of New York City, Mamdami. And Bill de Blasio, Long Island guy, went to chat GPT and was like, let's see if we can put something together, some thoughts together for the Times of London. and responded and, you know, gave his thoughts, never claiming to be anyone other than who he is, Bill de Blasio.

45:48Felix Salmon: The Times of London ran with it, ran a story only later to discover, whoops, it's not the right Bill de Blasio, the guy in Park Slope. Then the New York Times ran a story that was like, there's a Bill de Blasio impersonator running around. Then Bill de Blasio of Long Island, who winters in Florida, read that he was being called Bill de Blasio impersonator and was affronted because, as he said, he was never trying to impersonate anyone. He was just being himself. He figured Times of London would figure out that he wasn't the actual Park Slope, Bill de Blasio, but they did not. And now there is a delightful story in Semaphore where Bill de Blasio, Long Island guy, is interviewed.

46:28Felix Salmon: And the best part, maybe, is that the interview took place through the ring camera on his house because he was in Florida and the reporter was on Long Island doing the interview through the ring camera.

46:41Emily Peck: I love it. It is a glorious, glorious, glorious story. We love it so much. So wonderful.

46:46Felix Salmon: That's some good, she loved her journalism right Just terrific stuff. Really, really happy.

46:52Emily Peck: My number is 136 ,000, which is the price in yen of the Grace Delight Tote handbag. It's a very lightweight handbag. And it is the handbag of choice of Sanai Takeichi, who is the new prime minister of Japan. And once the bloggers or the social medias worked out what this handbag was, it became massively popular. It is now basically sold out everywhere. If you want to order it from Hamana, which is the 145-year-old Japanese leather goods maker who makes this handbag, you're not going to be able to get it before April. And good luck getting them to return your emails or anything like that. But well done, Prime Minister Takiyichi, for creating a new it tote.

47:47Emily Peck: Oh, and by the way, 136 ,000 yen is about$895. So that's an expensive handbag, but not a crazy expensive handbag.

47:57Felix Salmon: I want to see it. Can I Google it? What is it called? Tote of New... It's called the Grace Delight Tote. Grace Delight Tote. It just looks like a big leather purse. I thought it was going to be like, because when you said tote, in my mind, And I'm like, New Yorker tote bag.

48:12Emily Peck: Yeah, no, it's not a canvas tote bag.

48:16Elizabeth Spiers: But it's very nice, very classy.

48:18Emily Peck: Very demure, very mindful. Elizabeth, what's your number?

48:22Elizabeth Spiers: My number is$59.99. And that is the price of a K-pop demon hunter costume at Spirit Halloween, which they are totally sold out of. Because apparently the way that they sort of engineer these costumes is they try to anticipate demand ahead of time, like even a year or two before and they did not anticipate the popularity of k-pop demon hunters and so now if you want that costume you have to make it yourself so by the time the pod comes out you will have probably seen four million tiny k-pop demon hunters shout out to my colleague

48:56Emily Peck: nicky at bloomberg who ordered a k-pop demon hunter halloween costume from alibaba or somewhere in China months ago and it has still not arrived and she is spinning out and yeah she is definitely in a world of like oh my god am I gonna have to learn how to make a costume at home are you two

49:17Felix Salmon: gonna wear well Felix you're in Ireland I don't know if they do what they do for Halloween but

49:21Elizabeth Spiers: do you two get dressed up my kid this year wants us to dress up with him but we have not come up with an outfit yet but I went to a party last week where there was a couple and they were dressed as six, seven. One of them was six and the other was seven. So if I'm desperate, that's going to be our easy to assemble.

49:38Emily Peck: I got a pitch this week from a book publicist who was trying to pitch me on a personal finance book that had been written by a married couple. And she's like, this is a personal finance book on like having happy finances if you're married, written by the couple behind the viral six seven halloween costume like that's their that's their claim to fame and they're just like what that's definitely their experts gives me a great great confidence in there i'm like if you can come out with a viral six seven halloween costume then managed by money i will take your financial advice any day of the week they're probably rich from it i don't think you get rich by having your photograph of your six seven and by the way the reason it went viral is because everyone was laughing at it and the kids all hate it.

50:29Felix Salmon: Oh no.

50:32Elizabeth Spiers: All right. I guess I should cross that one off my list.

50:37Emily Peck: I think that's it for us this week. Thank you for listening to Slate Money. Thank you for emailing us on slatemoneyatslate.com. Send us photos of your K-pop demon hunters outfit that you managed to order in time from China or buy from Spirit Halloween before they sold out. and thank you to Jessamine Molly and Shana Roth for producing. This has been fun, but it's not over yet because we will, as ever, be back next week with even more Sleep Money.